Michele Alacevich is a research fellow at the University of Palermo, Italy. His research interests include the political economy of international organizations in historical perspective, the contemporary history of economic development and financial institutions, the role of economic advisors in international relations, and the history of development economics in the twentieth century.
Michele obtained his Ph.D. in Economic and Business History at the University of Milano in 2006. His Ph.D. thesis was published as The Political Economy of the World Bank:The Early Years, by Stanford University Press, 2009 (originally published in Italian in 2007 by Bruno Mondadori and forthcoming in French, Russian and Spanish). He has also co-authored, with Daniela Parisi, Economia politica. Un’introduzione storica, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2009, and is the author of several articles published in scholarly journals on the history of economic institutions and ideas after World War II. Michele has been a consultant to the World Bank for historical research.
At the Italian Academy, Michele will work on his next book on the policies for regional development after World War II and the World Bank loans to Italy, from 1948 to1965. This book is the final outcome of his research program at the University of Palermo on regional economic backwardness in historical perspective and the Italian Mezzogiorno, and will appear in the series of historical studies of Banca d’Italia, published by Laterza.

Author of several papers on early modern medical culture and practices in Sixteenth-Century Rome, she received her Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and the Università La Sapienza in 2007. Before coming to the Italian Academy she was Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute (2008/2009), Attaché Temporaire d’Enseignement et de Recherche at the Université des Antilles et de la Guyane (2007/2008), and member of international projects such as the program Sciences et capitales européennes : revisiter les origines de l’espace public des savoirs (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècle) - Young Researchers Programme 2006-2009 ANR-France.

Laura Barreca has taught at the Faculty of Architecture, University "La Sapienza", Rome, as professor of the Course of History of Contemporary Art, in 2009. She is Assistant Professor of the Chair of History of Contemporary Art, Faculty of Conservation of Cultural and Artistic Heritage, University of Viterbo. She works as external consultant for the Ministero dei Beni e delle Attività Culturali, for the Land Art project "Sensi Contemporanei" (Basilicata 2009). For the MAXXI-Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo she is curator of the project "Committenze contemporanee", in collaboration with UniCredit Group and Galleria Borghese. Since 2007, she worked as Junior Curator at PAN|Palazzo delle Arti Napoli. Since the completion of her Ph.D., she has been writing articles and papers, and has been invited to present lectures in several conferences (Madrid 2007; Montreal 2008; Rome 2008-2009) about "Conservation and Documentation of New Media Art".

Director of the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio. He was Visiting Professor at the University of Ferrara (1994 -2002), and the University of Milan (2005). In 2008, he was Craig Hugh Smyth Visiting Fellow at Villa I Tatti, Florence. His broad interests center on Renaissance architectural history, with a particular emphasis on Venetian architecture and on the culture of the Antique in the Renaissance. Among his publications are: Palladio Privato (Venice 2008 and Berlin 2009); PALLADIO (exhibition catalogue, edited with Howard Burns; London 2009); Vincenzo Scamozzi 1548-1616 (exhibition catalogue, edited with Franco Barbieri; Venice 2003).

Giorgio Caravale (Ph.D. 2000) is Assistant Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Roma Tre. He was Lila Wallace - Reader’s Digest Fellow at the Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence, Villa I Tatti (2006-2007). He has held post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Rome “Sapienza” (2001-2003), Fondazione Luigi Firpo in Turin (2003-2005) and Fondazione Michele Pellegrino in Turin (2005-2006). He was a short-term fellow at the Institut d’Histoire de la Réformation of Geneva (2004), at the University of Madison, Wisconsin (2005), and at the Newberry Library of Chicago (2007). He is the author of many articles on book censorship and the Roman Inquisition and three volumes: L’orazione proibita. Censura ecclesiastica e letteratura devozionale nella prima età moderna (Florence, Olschki, 2003), Sulle tracce dell’eresia. Ambrogio Catarino Politi (1484-1553) (Florence, Olschki, 2007), and Il profeta disarmato. L’eresia di Francesco Pucci nell’Europa del Cinquecento (in press). He is currently working on a long-lenghth book on ecclesiastical censorship and Italian culture in the early modern age.

Tiziano Colibazzi, M.D., is Assistant Professor of Clinical Neuroscience in the Department of Child Psychiatry at Columbia University. Dr Colibazzi's research has encompassed several topics including using fMRI to probe emotional circuitry in humans and exploring structure and shape in the normal brain and in schizophrenia. More recently, Dr. Colibazzi's research has focused on understanding how the adolescent brain changes throughout development and whether this knowledge can help us predict who will develop schizophrenia.

A professor at the National University of Mongolia (NUM), she got an M.A. at Saint Petersburg University’s Faculty of Philosophy in 1983 and a Ph.D. at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences in 1995. In 1983-1995 she was a researcher at the Mongolian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy; since 1996 she has lectured on “Buddhist philosophy,” “Philosophy of religion,” and “History of Mongolian religion and philosophy” to the Philosophy and Religion Studies students of NUM. She has published seven books and more than 40 academic articles.

Senior Lecturer, Uppsala University, Department of History of Science and Ideas. He is author of Machiavelli and Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2004) and several major articles on Machiavelli and Renaissance political thought, including "The Two Myths of Civic Humanism," in Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge University Press, 2000). In the past, he has held fellowships at Villa I Tatti: The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, Stanford Humanities Center and The National Humanities Center.

Gianfranco Pasquino (1942) graduated in Political Science from the University of Torino, supervisor Norberto Bobbio, and specialized in Comparative Politics at the University of Florence under the guidance of Giovanni Sartori. In 1975, after teaching at the University of Bologna and Florence, he became full professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna. He has also been teaching for more than thirty years at the Bologna Center of the Johns Hopkins University. In 1974-75, he was Lauro de Bosis Lecturer in the History of Italian Civilization at Harvard. In 1978-79, he was Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. He has been visiting Professor at the School of Advanced International Studies, Washington D.C., and at the University of California, Los Angeles. In the Fall Term of 1999, he was Fellow of the Juan March Institute in Madrid. In the Spring of 2001, he was Fellow of Christ Church College at Oxford and in 2007 of St Antony’s, Oxford. He is life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge.
Among the founders of the Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica, he was its managing editor for seven years and co-editor for three years. Editor of the bimonthly journal Il Mulino (1980-1983), he is on the editorial board of several academic journals, notably: the Journal of Modern Italian Studies, European Political Science, Parliamentary Affairs, Revista Argentina de Ciencia Politica.
He has written widely on Italian politics and on Comparative Politics, most recently Sistemi politici comparati (2007, 3^rd ed.,translated into Spanish and Portuguese) and Le istituzioni di Arlecchino (6^th ed., www.scriptaweb.it). He has co-edited the Dizionario di Politica (3^rd ed. ,2004) and edited Strumenti della democrazia (2007) .
From 1983 to 1992 and from 1994 to 1996 he served as Senator of the Italian Republic. He received two degrees ad honorem from the University of Buenos Aires and from the University of La Plata. In 2005, he was elected to the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. At the Italian Academy, he plans to write a book on the Theory of Political Development.

Franco Pestilli obtained a B.A. from La Sapienza University, Rome (Italy), specializing in Experimental Psychology and Artificial Intelligence. For his doctoral research, he worked in the laboratory of Marisa Carrasco at New York University, New York (USA).
Since his PhD, he has been working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Neuroscience of Columbia University, New York (USA), and as a Visiting Scientist at the Riken Brain Science Institute, Wako (Japan). He is currently working in the Laboratory of Vincent Ferrera at Columbia University. His research focuses on distinguishing the effects of attention and expected reward on behavior and neural response. In life, one attends to stimuli that are behaviorally relevant, and often relevant stimuli are those that will predict rewards. For this reason, the effects of attention and that of expected reward on neural response can be easily confounded. Pestilli is investigating how the neural mechanisms dedicated to control attention and predict reward interact to affect one's decisions.

Valeria Pettorino got her Ph.D. in physics in 2005 at the University Federico II in Napoli, Italy, and in collaboration with SISSA, Trieste, Italy. In 2005-2006, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Torino (Italy); she then moved to SISSA in 2007 within the D4 Project. She was named Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Physics in Heidelberg, Germany , where she worked from July 2007 until July 2009.
She works on several aspects concerning cosmology, the study of the content and evolution of the Universe. In particular, her areas of expertise concern dark energy, a component contributing to about 74% of the content of the Universe and providing cosmological acceleration. She investigates this issue from a theoretical point of view, within coupled quintessence theories as well as scalar tensor theories. Furthermore, she investigates effects on observations both within linear perturbations, on cosmic microwave background and at the non linear level, within structure formation, also via N-body simulations. She has recently joined the PLANCK and EUCLID collaborations.

Silvia Salvatici specializes in Modern history with particular emphases on individual and collective memories in post-war societies, women refugees in the 20th century, gender and human rights, and European displaced persons in the aftermath of WWII. She received a PhD in Historical Sciences from the International Post-graduate School of Social Sciences of San Marino University and a PhD in Family and Gender History from the University of Naples "L'Orientale." Among her most recent publications are "Public Memory, Gender and National Identity in Post-War Kosovo: The Albanian Community," in Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes (eds), Oral History and Public Memories, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2008; "Le Gouvernement anglais et les femmes réfugiées d'Europe après la Deuxième guerre mondiale," in Mouvement social, Fall 2008; Senza casa e senza paese. Profughi europei nel secondo dopoguerra, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2008. Dr. Salvatici is lecturer in modern history at the University of Teramo (Italy) where she teaches Women's and Gender History. Since 2008 she has been Honorary Research Fellow at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology of Birkbeck College. During her time at the Italian Academy she will be working on a new research project with the title "Professionals of Rehabilitation. UNRRA Officers in Postwar Europe". With this project she will investigate the gendered re/construction of relief work in the immediate aftermath of World War II, which represents an unwritten chapter in the history of the emergence of welfare, humanitarianism and internationalism during European reconstruction.

Assistant Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She has published numerous articles on institutional development and social dynamics of post-war societies, and in particular on the divergent narratives about the Second World War that have emerged among Istrians living in Italy and in Croatia. Through a US National Science Foundation grant, since 2008 she has been refining a new methodological approach to narrative analysis and has presented her work on narrative as an invited speaker at numerous universities and symposia in the US and abroad.

D. Graham Burnett is an editor at Cabinet magazine in Brooklyn, and a member of the faculty at Princeton University. His training is in the history and philosophy of science, and he is the author of four books, most recently Trying Leviathan (Princeton) which was awarded the 2008 New York City Book Award and the Hermalyn Prize for Urban History.

Officer of the Légion d'honneur
Commander of L'ordre national du Mérite
Commander of the Palmes Académiques
Commander of Arts and Letters
Honorable Academician of the Accademia Clementina
Honorable Academician of the Académie d'Aix-en-Provence
Member of the Accademia dei Lincei (1997)
Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Italy


Born in Marseilles on 10 June 1932, Marc Fumaroli spent his childhood and adolescence in Fès. His mother was his first teacher. He completed his secondary education and Baccalauréat in Letters at the Lycée Ville-Nouvelle in Fès. He completed his higher education at the Lycée Thiers in Marseilles, at the University of Aix-en-Provence and at the Sorbonne. He passed the Agrégation in Classical Letters in 1958. He did his military service at the École militaire interarmes de Cõetquidan and in the 6th Artillery Regiment in Colbert in the Constantinois between September 1958 and January 1961. He was pensionnaire of the Fondation Thiers from September 1963 to August 1966. He was elected assistant of the Faculty of Letters at Lille at his return in 1965, and Doctor of Letters at IV-Sorbonne in June 1976. During the same month he was elected master of conferences at the Paris IV-Sorbonne, succeeding Professor Raymond Picard. Director of the journal, XVIIe siècle (1976-1986) and member of the editorial board of the journal Commentaire (1978-1995), under the directorship of Raymond Aron until his death in 1983 and thereafter under that of Jean-Claude Casanova.

In 1986 Marc Fumaroli was elected professor of the Collège de France, to which he was presented by the poet Yves Bonnefoy and the historian Jean Delumeau, and was granted the chair entitled "Rhetoric and Society in Europe (16th-17th centuries)." In 1977 he participated in the foundation of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, over which he presided between 1984 and 85, and organized the Third International Congress at Tours in the last-mentioned year. He served as director of Centre d'étude de la langue et de la literature françaises des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris IV-C.N.R.S.) from 1984-1994. From 1993 to 1999, he was president of the Association pour la sauvegarde des enseignements littéraires (S.E.L.) founded by Mme. Jacqueline de Romilly. After 2000 he succeeded René Pomeau as president of the Society of Literary History of France. He has presided over the Association of the Friends of the Louvre since 1996. In October 2006 he succeeded the Lord Chancellor Gabriel de Broglie as the president of the Interministerial Commission of Technology.

He was a visiting professor at All Souls College, Oxford in 1983 and a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1984. He has taught and delivered lectures in numerous universities in the United States (most notably at New York University, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Princeton, Houston, Los Angeles). Invited by Allan Bloom, he delivered a series of lectures in the division known as the Committee for Social Thought in Chicago of which he became a member, with the status of a professor of the university 'at large', where he teaches two months a year. He has been invited to lecture at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., most notably in the Fifteenth Anniversary Lecture Series. He returned there in March-April 2000 to deliver the six Mellon Series Lectures of that year. He gave the Casal Lecture at the University of London and the Zaharoff Lecture at the University of Oxford in 1991. Each year in May he gives a series of lectures at the Istituto di Studi Filosofici founded and directed by M. Gerardo Marotta, and participates frequently in the congresses at the Cini Foundation in Venice. He has received invitations from most Italian universities. He received honorary doctorates from the University of Naples (Federico II) in 1994, from the University of Bologna in 1999, from the University of Genoa and the University Complutense in Madrid in 2004, and the University Complutense in Madrid in 2005, and his courses at the Collège de France have twice been given in Italian universities: the University of Rome in 1995-1996; and the Scuola normale superiore in Pisa in 1999-2000. Since his youth he has considered Italy his second homeland, and is proud of counting among his innumerable friends there, Professor Tullio Gregory, Director of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Rome - la Sapienza. He is a member of numerous learned societies in France and abroad. He is an associate member of the British Academy, member of the American Academy of Science, Letters and Arts, member of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, member of the Accademia dei Lincei (since 1997), and he is president of the Société littéraire de la France, and a frequent collaborator in the Revue. He regularly contributes articles to daily and weekly newspapers in France and abroad. In 1982 he received the Monsieur Marcel prize from the Académie française and in 1992 its Critique award. He received the Balzan prize in September 2001, the Lafue prize in 2002, and the Mémorial and Combourg prizes in 2004.

On March 2nd 1995 the Académie française elected him to the sixth chair, in which he succeeded Eugène Ionesco. In 1998 he was elected to the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in the chair left vacant by Georges Duby.